Volunteer Updating of Authoritative Geospatial Databases

This project led by Dr. Coleman investigates the use of ‘geospatial wikis’ to support collaborative and authoritative data maintenance in a geospatial data infrastructure.

The project builds on previous experience with collaborative systems, mapping, workflow analysis, and geospatial data infrastructure, and is influenced by the increasing convergence of three phenomena: (1) the widespread use of GPS and image-based mapping technologies by professionals and expert amateurs; (2) the emerging role of Web 2.0, wikis, and standard based authentication processes to contribute information to the Web; and (3) the growth of social networking tools, practices and culture.

In particular, it investigates and demonstrates how contributions from both individual citizens and professional mapping projects may be authenticated, processed and employed to populate new open-source and commercial databases.